More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
June 20 - June 27, 2020
“Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation.”
White public opinion seemed more ready to accept racial change than did the white officials, the black leaders noted.
One observer noted how King increasingly made reference to Mohandas K. Gandhi. “In reminding the followship that love will win,” editor Jackson wrote, “he often tells the story of how Mahatma Gandhi, the emaciated emancipator, liberated India with his nonviolence campaign.… What he,” King, “seems to be trying to do is to find a suitable adaptation of the Gandhi philosophy and method and apply it to the Montgomery problem.”
But King’s message stressed action, not passivity. “Our weapons are protest and love,” he told one meeting, and “we are going to fight until we take the heart out of Dixie.”
on their way back a white bus driver insisted that the two surrender their seats to newly boarding white riders. M.L. resisted at first, but his teacher finally encouraged him to get up, and the young man had to stand for several hours as the bus made its way to Atlanta. “It was,” King recalled twenty years later, “the angriest I have ever been in my life.”21 That was the most traumatic encounter with segregation that young King suffered.
Looking back on these experiences a decade later, King recalled that he had never fully gotten over the shock of his initial discovery of racial prejudice as a six-year-old. “From that moment on,” he remembered, “I was determined to hate every white person. As I grew older and older, this feeling continued to grow,” even though “my parents would always tell me that I should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty, as a Christian, to love him.”
“The first twenty-five years of my life were very comfortable years, very happy years,” King later said,
I didn’t have to worry about anything. I have a marvelous mother and father. They went out of their way to provide everything for their children … I went right on through school; I never had to drop out to work or anything. And you know, I was about to conclude that life had been wrapped up for me in a Christmas package.
If we are arrested every day, if we are exploited every day, if we are trampled over every day, don’t ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate.
“I said to Dr. King,” Smiley recalled, “‘I’m assuming that you’re very familiar and have been greatly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi.’ And he was very thoughtful, and he said, ‘As a matter of fact, no. I know who the man is. I have read some statements by him, and so on, but I will have to truthfully say’—and this is almost a direct quote …—‘I will have to say that I know very little about the man.’” King emphasized that he nonetheless admired Gandhi, and Smiley described to him how the essence of nonviolence was a refusal to retaliate against evil, a refusal based on the realization that “the
...more
And my great prayer is always that God will save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fear of the consequences for his personal life, he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems that we confront.
As news photographers snapped pictures, the bus pulled away from the curb. Black Montgomery, after 382 days of mass effort, had achieved its goal.56
There were three things about Gandhi, King told his Dexter congregation the day after his return, that were especially commendable. First was his great capacity for self-criticism. Second was his all but total avoidance of material possessions. Third was the “absolute self-discipline” that Gandhi had exhibited in his private as well as in his public life, so that “there was no gulf between the private and the public,” King noted in admiration. Gandhi had steadfastly refused to use any of the large amounts of money that people sent him. Once, King remarked, Gandhi had even criticized his wife
...more
King had found him a very persuasive man. “Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere … he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity,” King observed. “If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”
That one statement, “We had faith,” summed up the beauty and the pain of Albany. It was a faith that white obstinacy and federal disinterest had proved naïve and misplaced.
In his dinner speech, King voiced his strongest public criticism of John Kennedy to date. “No President can be great, or even fit for office,” King intoned, “if he attempts to accommodate to injustice to maintain his political balance.”
King’s reflections and the two days of intensive conversations, he later explained, led him to conclude that two principal errors had been made in Albany. First, the Albany Movement was centered on segregation in general, and no form of segregation in particular, and I think it would have been greater and would have been wiser, from a strategic and tactical point of view to say, “now we are going to attack segregated lunch counters,” or “we are going to attack segregated buses,” … in other words, center it on something.… I think the main tactical error was that the leadership did not center
...more
Southern racism was a brutal experience for blacks, but Albany had conveyed little of that brutality to either the nation or those in Washington whose lack of moral sensitivity had been expressed by their preference for order over justice. In Birmingham, however, the city’s defense of segregation—at least until the upcoming municipal election in March—would be led by Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, who was infamous for his hair-trigger temper and heavy-handed advocacy of segregation.
The Kennedy brothers, the Dorchester group concluded, would respond if their hand was forced by demonstrations that evoked the true character of southern segregation.
Then, Levison remembered, King spoke up: ‘I want to make a point that I think everyone here should consider very carefully and decide if he wants to be with this campaign.’ He said, ‘There are something like eight people here assessing the type of enemy we’re going to face. I have to tell you that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign. And I want you to think about it.’
“Martin doesn’t think about the possibility of anything happening,” but King lived with the certainty that at some point something would happen, and that there was nothing he could do to avoid it. “He just always talked about the fact that he didn’t expect to have a long life,” Coretta said later. “Somehow he always felt that he would die early,” and he saw no need always to be on guard against the inevitable.
The boycott would be an inducement to Birmingham to grant the movement’s six specific goals: desegregation of the store facilities; adoption of fair hiring practices by those stores; dismissal of all charges from previous protests; equal employment opportunities for blacks with the city government; reopening on a desegregated basis of Birmingham’s closed municipal recreation facilities; and establishment of a biracial committee to pursue further desegregation.
Although the boycott had been effective, only the widespread disorder of that Tuesday afternoon had convinced the city’s business leadership to settle. Masses of unrestrained black teenagers had convinced the downtown businessmen in a way that peaceful picketing or sit-ins never had that segregation was not worth the price they would have to pay.
the Birmingham crisis. That event had elevated King to the indisputable civil rights top spot in the American public’s mind. It also meant that King’s SCLC, rather than the long-established NAACP, would be the chief financial beneficiary of this new interest in civil rights.
John Kennedy interrupted, saying, “Including the Attorney General.” Then the president expressed a sentiment that both he and his brother strongly shared, a sentiment that said much about their political and emotional evolutions over the preceding six weeks. “I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor. After all, he has done more for civil rights than almost anybody else.”
Randolph stressed how “the mood of the Negro today is one of impatience and anger, frustration if not desperation.”
Though SCLC was in the best financial shape of its life—with income of $735,000 and expenses of only $383,000 for the twelve months ending in August, 1963—hundreds of thousands of dollars were tied up in the bail bonds that had been obtained to secure the release of the hundreds of demonstrators arrested in May.
If Levison were a Communist agent, as the Bureau led Kennedy to believe, and if King was dissembling about his ties to the man, such direct surveillance was warranted. Given the fact that any public leak about the King-Levison allegations by the Bureau or its congressional friends might torpedo the civil rights bill, granting the FBI its wiretaps would serve a political as well as a “national security” purpose.
He called downstairs to his wife, who was on the phone. “Corrie, I just heard that Kennedy has been shot, maybe killed.” She joined him in front of the TV, and together they awaited more news. “While we were waiting and sitting,” Coretta later recalled, Martin said, “Oh, I hope that he will live, this is just terrible. I think if he lives, if he pulls through this, it will help him to understand better what we go through.” Then came the news that Kennedy was dead. King was quiet for a few moments, Coretta remembered, “but finally he said, ‘This is what is going to happen to me. This is such a
...more
King was deeply disturbed by John Kennedy’s death. He believed the assassination reflected not just one man’s deed but a larger and more tragic national climate of violence.
“I really think we saw two Kennedys,” King explained some months later, one prior to Birmingham and another afterward. King had been touched by Kennedy’s June speech on civil rights. Even though the administration’s handling of its civil rights bill had left much to be desired, King had hoped that Kennedy “was getting ready really to throw off political considerations and see the real moral issues.” Now there would be no opportunity to see that hope fulfilled.
After the public ceremony, the president spoke in private with King, Wilkins, Whitney Young, and other black representatives. He told them that there had to be “an understanding of the fact that the rights Negroes possessed could now be secured by law, making demonstrations unnecessary and possibly even self-defeating.” Johnson suggested they would be self-defeating for the movement, but most of those in attendance, King included, knew that the president’s real fear was that protests would play into the hands of Republican candidates seeking to convince fearful whites that someone other than
...more
By the time King returned from the West Coast, it was apparent that compliance with the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act was so widespread throughout Alabama that no statewide action campaign could be built around continued segregation in public establishments.
Serious marital differences already existed over King’s insistence on giving away the Nobel money, his demand that the family live in the most modest circumstances possible, and his belief that Coretta’s primary role was to stay home and raise the children. Outweighing them all, however, was the fact that there were some things Martin King badly needed that he could not find at home. Now that King faced the threat of having his personal life exposed in excruciating detail to the entire nation, the inner pressures were worse than ever.
King already realized that his private life was no secret. Many movement activists were aware of his various sexual involvements with a number of different women, and James Farmer was not the only person who had cautioned King about the serious damage that the proliferating stories could do.
“‘I’m away from home twenty-five to twenty-seven days a month,’” King answered. “‘Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction.’”
King’s vision was more far-reaching than his public remarks would indicate. It was an unforgettable realization, Fager recalled years later. “I remember the words exactly, ‘If we are going to achieve real equality, the United States will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.’”
Suddenly, the streetlights went out, and the detachment of lawmen began assaulting the demonstrators with billyclubs. The terrified protesters scattered, while across the street white toughs attacked the contingent of national newsmen. NBC’s Richard Valeriani suffered a serious head wound, and a short distance away, inside a small café, a trooper shot a young black man who was attempting to shield his mother from the lawmen’s blows. The victim, Jimmie Lee Jackson, bleeding heavily from a stomach wound, was taken to a Selma hospital.
King’s long flight to Los Angeles afforded him the luxury of uninterrupted time to reflect on Malcolm X’s assassination. The two men had met only once—eleven months earlier in Washington—and had spoken to each other for no more than a minute, but Malcolm’s death troubled King.
“I look forward to talking with him,” King told a black newsman shortly after the Nobel Peace Prize announcement. Subsequent events—Malcolm’s utterance of anti-Semitic statements—had cooled King’s ardor.
Several aides recommended that the marchers be allowed to head east from Selma along U.S. Highway 80 without any hindrance, for there was no chance that the illprepared participants, who expected to be stopped, could complete the fifty-four-mile walk. This approach, gubernatorial press secretary Bill Jones argued, would make King and his compatriots “the laughing stock of the nation,” especially if state authorities led the unsuspecting protesters to think they would be halted on the outskirts of Selma. Wallace agreed, and while Alabama newspapers reported that the march would be blocked, word
...more
Finally, King consented that they would proceed without him. As he explained it the next day, “It was agreed that I not lead the march because of the revelation of the fact that State Troopers would block our move forward. It was suggested that I remain in Atlanta for my Sunday church responsibilities and mobilize national support for a larger thrust forward.”
Hosea Williams responded to Cloud’s declaration by asking, “May we have a word with the major?” Cloud replied, “There is no word to be had.” They repeated this exchange twice. Then Cloud announced, “You have two minutes to turn around and go back to your church.” As they had agreed previously, the column’s leaders silently held their ground. Approximately sixty seconds passed. Then Cloud ordered, “Troopers, advance.”
King brought the marchers to a halt. He informed the lawmen that his followers would conduct prayers, and different notables came forward to recite homilies as a tense LeRoy Collins watched from the roadside. Then after singing “We Shall Overcome,” King and those immediately behind him turned and began to lead the column in a narrow loop back toward Pettus Bridge. Just as they turned, however, the line of troopers that had been blocking the highway suddenly withdrew to the side of the road, leaving it wide open.
Monday evening a nationwide television audience of seventy million people watched Lyndon Johnson give his address. The memorable speech marked the first time in nineteen years that an American president had personally presented a special message to Congress on a domestic issue. Johnson reviewed the events in Selma, noting that the protests and their violent reception sprang from the long history of black disfranchisement in the South.
“Tears actually came to Dr. King’s eyes when President Johnson said, ‘We shall overcome,’” John Lewis remembered. Never before, in nine years time, had the movement received the breadth of national support, and the strength of federal endorsement, that this week had witnessed. It was an emotional peak unmatched by anything that had come before, nor by anything that would come later.50
For one, as Coretta later explained it, “he was reluctant in the first place to own a house. He didn’t want to own a house because he felt that this would set him apart,” and “felt it was inconsistent with his philosophy” and his strong doubts about America’s celebration of private property. He had “strong feelings about owning a lot of property or acquiring a lot of wealth,” and brushed off his wife’s frequent reminders that the family deserved a better abode.
“Garvey was the first man of color in the history of the United States to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny and make the Negro feel he was somebody,” King told a crowd of two thousand.
Rustin recalled. “He was absolutely undone, and he looked at me and said, ‘You know, Bayard, I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I’ve got to do something … to help them get the money to buy it.’” Rustin had been telling King for nearly two years that the most serious issues facing the movement were economic problems of class rather than race, but on this evening Rustin sensed that the day’s experiences had convinced King of the truth of that analysis. “That struck Martin very, very deeply,”
Ideas like racial equality and “a better distribution of wealth” eventually would triumph, aided by leaders who realized they must do what is right, and not only what is popular. “If our economic system is to survive,” he told his parishioners, “there has to be a better distribution of wealth … we can’t have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth, while others live in abject, deadening poverty.”
